not retro enough for 90's/DOS games... this pc is too much, and the 2500+ cpu will be an overkill...

I can see how you might think its a little much.. Try civ4 on a 1ghz pc.. it sucks. I can always softclock the CPU to a lower speed if I need to, or run DOSbox 😜 At one point I had Jane's ATF running at 1.4ghz and it was amazing. I need the ram for Civ and my for day to day things.. it isn't unusual for me to have 6 or 7 programs running at once. Still some of the hardware is coming up on being a decade old.. thats retro for me.

I finished up a set of 3dMark99 benchmarks in it's current state... I really wanted to compare the voodoos to the radeon but every time I start it with the radeon it crashes 🙁

Win98 (4.10 build 2222), all official updates Microsoft
DirectX 9.0c
FastVoodoo2 4.6, KoolSmokey's Glide beta 23 June 2007
3Dmark99 MAX, 3Dnow! optimizations

640x480x16 DB = 5,485 marks // 21,685 CPU
640x480x16 TB = 6,183 marks // 21,764 CPU
800x600x16 DB = 4,193 marks // 21,540 CPU
800x600x16 TB = 5,216 marks // 21,705 CPU
1024x768x16 DB = 3,156 marks // 21,534 CPU
1024x768x16 TB = 3,751 marks // 21,645 CPU

I have spent close to 40 hours playing UT99 in the last 12 days (I recently got fired form my job, poor me) and it averages about 50fps, min 35 and max 70. Thats with A3D sound @ 44.1khz.

Tired to bench with 3Dmark2k... crashes even with the voodoos. I might bust out some Sandra later. My XP partition is all screwed up from a cluster of v5 drivers in my futile attempt to run Civ4 on it. I'll dink around with that when I get my proc.

dunno about "retro"rocket looks more like a good "Quake 3 performer PC"

Haters! j/k. I basically wanted to build the fastest platform I could get my hands on with and ISA slot. I got lucky and caught a steal on the motherboard, and from there I'm just gonna max it out. So maybe it is more of a Swiss Army box than retro.. but I live in a condo and have fiance so I can't have one computer for each era. It is kinda sad... I know.

Its funny I started this project being upset that the under DOSbox on a P4 ATF ran on par with my K6 from years ago. That was with medium-low quality. I didn't want to deal with a dual boot for DOS, and no sound just so I could play it fluid with max details. In the process I have become addicted to 3Dfx.

Now I'll be really proud of myself if I can beat the record for 3Dmarks on a voodoo2 SLI.. the highest score i have seen to this point was a little higher than 8k.

In addition to what has been said so far.... You bought a VIA KT133A based board on purpose? 😕 😉

Tell me.. whats so bad it? I mean it is quite the bastard.. ISA slots.. PC133 ram.. Picked it up for $35 at recycler shop. Included the 512 of ram and 1ghz t-bred. I'm happy with it though. I'm just glad I didn't end up with a BX or some other P.O.S. 😉

Are you serious? Comparing what many say is the worst chipset in history to the best chipset in history?

a 440bx is a POS?

Calm down guys, didn't you notice the smiley at the end of prophase_j's post?

And in my opinion he is right about the VIA KT133A, it wasn't a bad chipset at all, and the Epox KTA3(+(Pro)) was one of the best boards available at the time.

That sarcastic smiley had a reason 😁 so calm down guys...it was a joke and a pure tease 😉

okey dokey.
😁

5u3 wrote:

And in my opinion he is right about the VIA KT133A, it wasn't a bad chipset at all

But I totally disagree about that. I was burned, as were many others.

prophase_j,

you should build a proper "retro Athlon". Something with Slot A, AMD 750 Irongate chipset, and a 500 - 650 MHz CPU. 😀

5u3 wrote:

And in my opinion he is right about the VIA KT133A, it wasn't a bad chipset at all, and the Epox KTA3(+(Pro)) was one of the best boards available at the time.

KT133A had a bad southbridge (686B). Depending on how well the BIOS was written, it could work ok most of the time. But because of its PCI problems, users of accelerated audio cards probably inevitably ran into some sort of issue. And I don't mean just Live!, but also the Vortex cards. And if you tried out RAID, you saw that the PCI bandwidth was really pathetic. That PCI Latency patch for VIA chipsets from George Breese got pretty popular for a reason...

I had a Abit KT7A at one point. It was a good, usuable board, but my memory about day to day life with it is rather foggy now. Of course, if I still had it the caps would probably bursting by now. Good 'ol capacitor espionage nonsense. That board went out in a blaze of glory when a stray HDD power connector plugged itself into a USB header. 😉

VIA chipsets really got quite decent once they hit KT266A. KT266A, KT333, KT400/A, KT600, and KT880 are all good stuff as long as the board is quality too.

Interesting. I juist read a couple of reviews on it and saw one guy that HDtach'd the controllers.. the 686b had really high CPU utilization and the RAID didn't. Mine doesn't have the RAID though. I'm gonna check out the latency patches.. see what that's all about. What else do you know about it PCI issues.. or anything else you can think of?

Sorry to hear about your board man... I cringed when I read that

*edit*
Found this page.. its on a german site but it's in english
http://www.tecchannel.de/ueberblick/archiv/401770

I had tons of problems myself, but here is the gist of it.
http://adsl.cutw.net/dlink-dsl200-via.html

I haven't bought a VIA board since. Now that's not a problem. 😁

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Nice man.Surely you won't be able to make a Real DOS retro machine but for windows it's awesome!

After much thought I realized that there is only a handful of things that will need a real dos environment.. so yeah yeah *shrugs*

Now if I was to setup something older.. I would go with a K6 or maybe even the original pentium.

So I officially hate this board. Possibly the platform. For one reason or another I can't use over a 12.5x multiplier. Even though my bios has an option for 14x.. system won't boot. Another interesting thing it isn't detecting the voltage of the XP-M correctly. The current version of bios won't let me select 12.5x.. so i gotta go with 12x. If it fails to boot it will fall back on a default setting.. and that the only way I can even get to it. Until i set it to 12, it would only work every other power cycle. When i do get it to boot at 12.5x, and even the highest rated voltage... it will lock up randomly. By setting the fsb to 130 it will alos disable spread spectrum.. and at this point it is rock stable. Running 3dmark99 and prime95 at the same time for 24 hours straight stable.

I know the problem with the multipliers has to do with the new chips using 5 bits instead of 4.. but none of the multipliers settings seem to get it higher 12x. CPUMSR is supposed to be able to change the multiplier on the fly, and even with me using wpcredit to enable the powernow function on the northbridge it locks up when i try.

I give up! Ended up getting an Abit KT7A. I really hope i'm going to be done dealing with these processors soon.